Stephen Spender, 1940.Oil on canvasLucian Freud is now 85 and is still working. A new exhibition in London looks back some seven decades to the first years of his career. At the age of just 17, Freud painted poet and writer Stephen Spender

Gerald Wilde, 1943
Oil on panel
Freud characterised his early work as the product of 'maximum observation', achieved 'by staring at my subject matter and examining it closely' - a technique he moved away from over the following decade. Gerald Wilde (1905-86) was an established London artist whose dark work was inspired by the blitz

Man with Arms Folded, 1944Conté and chalk on brown paperThe man depicted here is the 16-year-old Michael Wishart, son of Freud's friend and subject Lorna Wishart, who furnished him not only with live sitters, but also with a dead heron (subject of another painting in the exhibition) and a stuffed zebra, which features in various early works

Portrait of a Man, 1946Oil on canvasThis work depicts John Craxton, a fellow painter who shared rooms with Freud in St John's Wood in the early 1940s. They spent time together in Paris in 1946, and spent the end of that summer painting in Greece, where this canvas was completed, hence the visible sunburn. Craxton says that this was the time when Freud 'made some of his most limpid and luminous paintings'

Girl in a Dark Jacket, 1947Oil on panelKitty Garman, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and niece of Lorna Wishart, was Freud's first wife. This was his first portrait of her, completed the year before their marriage

Man at Night (Self-portrait), 1947-48Pen, ink and contéAlthough a self-portrait, this drawing is very similar to a sketch of a character named Arvid from a series of Freud's illustrations, submitted to accompany the story Flyda of the Seas, by Princess Marie Bonaparte, a patron of Freud and a prominent psychoanalyst. The illustrations were rejected by the publisher

Girl in a Blanket, 1952Oil on canvasHenrietta Moraes was Freud's lover when she posed for this work. She recalled watching 'the contorted figures of meths drinkers creep past the cafe window' on the street below while sitting. Moraes was also painted frequently by Francis Bacon in the same period